Traditional landscape practice is highly constrained by the willingness of clients to commission project work. Landscape research, on the other hand, is less limited by commercial pressures with the result that it can more freely engage in areas or topics that we, as a discipline, might find compelling.
We can observe the latter in university teaching programs, where students are given relatively free rein in their selection of topics, sites and scales for research and design. Granted freedom of scope, students choose food systems and productive landscapes as perennial themes, their explorations buoyed by the fraught trajectories of our global food systems and their complex environmental impacts. Paralleling traditional landscape architecture practice approaches in recent decades, students also tend to focus on urban or peri-urban regions in their projects, only
